Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, author of Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, Breyten Breytenbach, poet, painter, human rights activist, author of a memoir about his seven-year imprisonment in Apartheid South Africa, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, and Taylor Pendergrass, senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union and co-author of Boxed In, discuss Saturday's symposium exploring the theme of solitary confinement.
→EVENT: Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities. Saturday, November 17, 2012, 10:45 AM to 8:30 PM at the Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8th Street, New York, NY.
Comments [8]
I attended the NYU conference on solitary confinement. Glad I went.
What about MT's comments re Riker's Island during Hurricane Sandy. How did it make out?
Mississippi gave it up because it cost too much. Mississippi is still a poor State.
New Jersey will be the last State to give it up. New Jersey is the richest State in the Nation.
And, New Jersey is a Police State. AC?MD
Obvious questions not asked: How are they engaging with prisoners families, of which there are millions, and could constitute massive protests nationwide? Also how are they engaging with corrections personnel? How are they engaging medical personnel in these prisons? There are many issues, including rape and slave labor, that *should be* tied together, in a general prison reform bill. Sorry to be glib, but what will middle class cheese and wine parties at bookstores and universities achieve, except making some academics feel good about themselves? Reform is long, long overdue and when mass inprisonment becomes too expensive to sustain, which will be sooner rather than later the way things are going, we will have a lot of damaged people on the streets and we can only blame ourselves. BTW, why the media blanket about what went on at Rikers post-Sandy? The lack of "curiosity" by the media is typical.
A society that allows solitary confinement and non-rehabilitation to be used in this way is in effect sociopathic. The lack of basic human empathy and emotional intelligence in the US and other countries that allow the abuse of solitary confinement appears to be worsening. The problem lies in the culture that allows such things to happen, not in an "evil" individual or institution. Until we face this fact, we will remain a sociopathic society. Is this the kind of country we want to be?
I hear and understand what the guests are saying, but what about those whose crimes are so horrific - who have not shown any respect to other humans? Should they truly be with others?
therapeutic centers often use "quiet rooms" which is a form of solitary confinement. At 14 I spent 2 days in a quiet room in a treatment facility for depression. For years I had anxiety from this incident.
Brian, go to a prison and spend a day as a guard. Then judge this method of control. That is why it is called a PRISON. It is not club med.
I recently attended a talk with Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis 3. I was struck by something he said about how prisoners in solitary confinement go crazy, which is a bad idea because after they serve out their terms, they are released back into society. Listening to his account, I was left with no doubt that solitary confinement is torture (not even including the brutality of the prison guards).
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